Meditation on culture

Here is a short essay written from me a couple months ago, originally in Albanian which is also my mother language, for a cultural magazine which kindly refused it’s publication due it’s ‘complicated nature’. I sometimes busy myself translating prose from English to Albanian but this is my first time doing the opposite. I would like to share it with you.

‘There is nothing permanent except change’

Heraclitus

While maturing; not sexually and not legally; mentally which happens in the fraction when the individual understands himself as such; thus he reaches the skill to divide himself as a particular entity within universe while independent apart determinated dependency which happens as a result of his human nature, it suffices to be Homo Sapiens to achieve possession of an absolute truth : ‘There is nothing permanent except change’. To our nature three are change variety’s, conscience upon which creates conditions of sensing the instant. The two first are given and the third invented. I guess that spirit as a detached and eternal entity is restrained under the knowledge of these three imperative forms of changing after which creates the order of maneuver within given spatiality; which in this case is universe as we know it. Ordering does not values but rather classifies them by degree of liberty. The first is the absolute form of changing to which every living creature is destined to end up. It’s sufficient living to have the absolute skill of dying. Not that two other forms of changing: physical and cultural change; are evitable to humans but death it’s the only identical point to every human being as an end to this nature of existence. My ignorance toward death is composed by exactly the same amount of knowledge of everyone else toward it. It’s that kind of case which it’s inevitability comes with impossibility of acquiring knowledge upon it while not yet tried. The most critical logic endeavor it’s employing it’s methods upon any issue which exceeds far beyond it’s nature. The imperative transformation from one state of being to another where possibility does not exclude inexistence of logic makes it impossible to apply the methods of it’s knowledge toward the unknown. Putting it firm and simple: logic can not know death. Child tenderly wandering, if world goes on while they’re asleep or when they’ll be dead, to the point where they meet nothingness does not necessary represents the true nature of issues wandered about, but rather represents the inertial acceptance of absolute bounds by our instrument of wandering. Not that this is a logic’s flaw which makes it impotent but simply it does not belong to it’s nature. It has been said by an existence master: It’s not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another. The second kind is physical change. Being aware of permanent physical change which happens simultaneously to man and his world (for that man is not his world and vice versa, at last we feel we’re something beyond our memoirs) coexists with his consciousness from the flash he’s being aware of being. A natural flowing cycle in this first installment of a serial soul. After physical and (if allowed to put this way) metaphysical change (death) are beyond possibilities of his will, man wouldn’t be distinguisher and distinguishable from any other living creature had not he didn’t invented his distinctive entity of changing: culture. By being aware of impossibility of physical eternity he invented the most virtual form of it: culture. It’s his attempt to deflect from the monotony caused by being locked in two other inevitable forms of changing. Practically culture is infinity of possibilities. Of it man borrows easiness in inventions like God, who signifies his perpetual will of boundless liberty, and by who is tried an explanation to fulfill the knowledge gap of inaccessible matters. Invention of a lazy mind. Art is just another kind of borrowed easiness but incomparably nobler and prouder than first. It’s the most elegant form of culture. While God conception needs changing the state of being to be proved the envied infinity, the art conception suffices earthly forms of mundane character to achieve it. Man invented culture after in love with eternity he became aware of inevitable which makes it impossible and had no other option but substitute with infinity. Culture is infinite freedom.

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Sir I thank you for taking your time to read my essay. I've written some other essays concerning this same topic and I'm planning their translation after I finish my fall semester exams. I've been wandering on culture as a human invention to free themselves from limpness of existence itself. Life as we know it ( neddy and melancholic) is just a compromise between the will to exist (existing weightlessly, timelessly, endlessly, painlessly) and nothingness. I do think of culture as a tricky path to achieve at last a mentally conviction of envied eternal existence.

Mentor, thank you for sharing this with us. To see culture as an infinite range of possibilities created in the face of inevitable physical deterioration and death is not a perspective often explored by anthropologists. What would it mean for anthropology to see every culture in this light? A very good question, indeed.